Yesterday marked the 2nd Annual International #IPAday — a global celebration dedicated to one of craft beer’s most beloved and iconic styles — the India Pale Ale. Last year, a lot of people wanted stats on the event — specifically Twitter stats — but I was unable to track down any tools that could give me a solid picture.

This year, that all changed. Thanks to the kind people at HashTracking. com, I was able to get my hands on a pro-report for a 24 hour period spanning from 2am (PST) on Thursday, August 2nd to 2am (PST) on Friday, August 3rd. As a result, this report is biased to the U.S. West Coast, and doesn’t completely represent the global picture of International IPA Day.

It is important to note that, outside of the U.S., reports of IPA Day were recorded from Europe (mostly the UK), China, Japan, New Zealand, Australia & Brazil — as well as other countries that I haven’t been able to officially capture data from. Although, many of these countries were very active on IPA Day, due to the major timezone differences, the data I’m sharing with you today mostly reflects the Western Hemisphere and U.S. participation in IPA Day.

Nonetheless, the data is pretty exciting and I am pretty stoked to pass it along. If you have any questions, comments or concerns about any of these numbers or findings, feel free to comment below and I will do my best to address them.

First, let’s talk about general stats. In the course of 24 hours, the #IPAday hashtag was tweeted 11.8 thousand times by 8 thousand people with a total followership of 5.1 million. This yielded over 10.2 million impressions.

The majority of tweets (in the thousands) were sent between the hours of 7pm PST and 9pm PST — roughly 10pm-12pm EST.

Of the total 11.8k tweets, 9.7k (83%) were original tweets, 922 (8%) were @message or reply tweets, and 1.1k (9%) were retweets.

Now, let’s talk about the big hitters on #IPAday — aka the influencers. First we have the categories for Most Popular and Most Tweets. The most popular #IPAday tweets were determined based on number of mentioned and number of retweets. Most Tweets speaks for itself.

And then we have the categories for most reach and most impressions. Most reach was determined based on number of followers. And most impressions was a combination of number of tweets and the number of followers (how many potential followers did those tweets reach?).

When it came down to where all the action took place, I relied on Trendsmap.com for real-time local Twitter trends. Sadly, these graphs are impossible to capture after the fact, so sadly all I have are two screen shots of the map — one of the world and one of the U.S. Luckily, they were taken during the “high traffic” time of #IPAday posts, so I do think the screen shots are on spot when it comes to tracking activity.

According to Trendsmap.com, throughout the day, the hashtag #IPAday trended, at one point or another, in the following North American cities: Vancouver (Canada), Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Boise, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, Denver, Austin, Houston, Jacksonville, Orland, Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh, Washington D.C., New York City, Philadelphia, Manchester, Boston, Indianapolis, Grand Rapids, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Kansas City, Des Moines, St. Louis and Winnipeg (Canada). And there were probably other cities that I didn’t see or write down because the map changed so frequently. But, you have to admit that this is a pretty damn good snapshot.

The U.S. at 6:18 PM (PST)

As for the most active cities, noted by the size of the #IPADay box floating over them, Atlanta, Philly, Chicago, Austin, San Diego, San Francisco and Vancouver take home the cake as the most popular IPA Day locations. The most amount of tweets during the day seem to have been coming from those cities. If I had to pick just one, I would say that Chicago was consistently one of the most popular, if not the most popular, #IPADay cities all day long.

The most impressive statistic, in my eyes, was Brazil, who consistently appeared on the Trendsmap all day long. U.S. and U.K. was expected to trend — but Brazil? Now, that is impressive!

The World at 6:13PM (PST)

As for the other social media platforms, little data is known. Unfortunately, Facebook’s privacy features do not allow us to get an accurate snapshot of IPA Day related posts. All we can do is estimate that Facebook had a similar overall participation number to Twitter (which was 8k, if you remember). Add fan pages into the mix and this number is amplified. As for Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, Flickr and all the other social media sites — that data is not also available at this time. However, the ever popular beer-themed social media platform Untappd should be releasing its data within a few hours or so — which will give us a little more insight.

When it comes to blog posts and articles from noteworthy media sources, hundreds if not thousands of sites made IPA Day reports. Other than doing a Google search on the terms #IPAday and IPA Day, there is little data that I have outside of my guesstimate.

Moral of the story is that the 2nd Annual #IPADay was a tremendous worldwide success. And I can say this with complete confidence, with or without statistics. Most people can probably agree that 8k+ people talking about craft beer on the Internet is a good thing for the industry, regardless of whether or not they personally “agreed” with the celebration concept. I also think it is safe to say that this has been the biggest virtual craft beer party to date — something you (my fellow par-tay people) should all be proud of.

And on my last note, I want to send a tremendously grateful toast to each and every single one of you that participated in #IPADay for your support and advocacy of craft beer! It is because of all of you that craft beer continues to grow and thrive in today’s crazy world and backwards economy!

Cheers!

About The Beer Wench

Ashley is a self-proclaimed craft beer evangelist & social media maven on a mission to advance the craft beer industry through education, inspiration and advocacy. She is currently the “Director of Awesomeness” at Bison Brewing in Berkeley, CA — where her responsibilities include everything from marketing, sales, PR, social media & events.
Ashley is also a freelance consultant and professional speaker on the subjects of social media, beer mixology, food & beverage pairings. She is the founder of DrinkWithTheWench.com & BeerMixology.com as well as a regular contributor to CraftBeer.com.

7 thoughts on “2nd Annual #IPADay Twitter Statistics & Analysis”

I think I was really close to being one the leaders in most tweets. Had I known how close I would have tried harder.

It was a fun day, Wench. When you first announced this thing for last year, I didn’t quite “get it”, I still probably don’t quite, but it really sucked me in to see what everyone was saying. Really cool.

Do you have any statistics on how many non-craft beer drinkers were educated about craft beer, other than from social media sites? For example, how many #IPADay events were held at bars, breweries, and/or homes around the world. I’m sure Untappd will probably be able to provide some of this data, but I didn’t know if you had any insight on the events that were listed on craftbeer.com.

As I understand it, roughly 95% of beer drinkers do not drink craft beer, which doesn’t even capture the people who don’t drink beer. Since you focused mainly on Twitter statistics, I will do the same. According to Pew Research Center study, only 14% of online Americans between the age of 30 and 49 (I’d say that’s the target audience of craft beer) are on Twitter. So, say I’m a Bud drinker and I’m one of the 86% of people that aren’t on Twitter; how did this “universal celebration of craft beer” educate me about craft beer?

As a fellow craft beer advocate, I think that only displaying stats from social media sites sends the wrong message to non-craft beer drinkers. It look like #IPADay is all about trends and getting an Untappd badge, or 2 if you checked in at a Flying Saucer location, and not about truly educating people about craft beer. Also, isn’t there already a craft beer week hosted by the Brewer’s Association, and city specific craft beer weeks. How does #IPADay differentiate itself from those events?

Untappd was down for about 4 hours of West Coast IPA’ing. I know that there were 100 people in Arizona trying to check in @wholefoodschraz and none went through. So the Untappd reports are… specious. For the Record. (yes, I’m being pissy)

I’m not sure how you measure the education of non-craft-beer-geeks. But, I would say it is our #IPADay responsibility as Craft-Beer-Advocates to verbally engage friends and co-workers.

I greeted everyone at work with the wish “Happy IPA Day”. That gave me an opening to talk a little bit about IPA’s and craft beers in general. I don’t know how much “education” I provided, but a few at least told me they would try some of the beers I talked to them about.